Tickenest

Sweet, this is the information I was looking for this weekend. My only remaining question, then, is how does the ROM or NOSE know whether it's a 28-team or a 30-team ROM?

I am looking for a particular piece of information and I don't have that particular piece of information and we learn things by asking questions and x 30 million

OR Do it myself!

For my next trick I'm trying to perfect the process of pulling player rosters and team names out of a ROM. I was using the string of bytes 00 92 00 0C, which in the original ROM appears 147 bytes before the first player's name for every team. I was testing it on a few custom ROMs, and when I got to clockwise's NHL '14 ROM it didn't work for the Islanders. I dug into his ROM and saw that there's a large gap of FF bytes between the Devils and the Islanders, and the 00 92 00 0C string doesn't appear, meaning that my stats extractor fails to read their data and I'm off by 1 for every remaining team on the ROM. So my question is...is there an unambiguous way to identify, in any NHL '94 ROM, original or custom, where each team begins and ends?

Eh, naturally, wboy had it a LONG time ago...I couldn't even find this on the forums. Another thread referred to it and a search finally pulled it up: http://forum.nhl94.com/index.php?/topic/64-number-of-forwards-and-defense-players/

Hah, found it! Thanks to naples39's comment, plus: Evan's goalie number guide: http://nhl94.com/html/editing/edit_bin_lines_goalies.php and to this thread talking about numbers of forwards/defensemen in the SNES version: http://forum.nhl94.com/index.php?/topic/7560-snes-checksumteam-length/ I was able to find it. 20 bytes past the "j" in the away team jersey is the byte that holds this information. So F8 means 15 forwards (F = 15) and 8 defensemen. I guess if you play with the number of goalies a team has you can throw off the forwards number, but it appears that that's the byte that contains the information I needed.

Interesting...now I just need to know which byte that is.

I've been working on my own save state parser for kicks this week and the resources on the site here have been extremely helpful. One thing I haven't been able to find or tease out is how the game knows whether a player is a forward or a defenseman. Evan's hacking guide makes clear how the game knows that someone is a goalie, but I haven't teased this one out. Any ideas?

Where does the Finnish community congregate these days, anyway?

Although some of the people on there can be meaner than kgman when he's been drinking.

Haxball is surprisingly good. I'll probably play it more down the line. I played http://www.globulos.com/ for a while many years ago. Somewhat similar concept.

It's a nice bit of trolling, yes.

You clearly weren't looking for a good time.

Except for my embedding of my YouTube video of said highlight reel, that is.

Well, having been name-checked by swos...I'll bite. I started playing NHL '94 back in 2001 not long after kaillera came into existence. I had been active in the QuakeWorld Team Fortress community in the late 90s and early 2000s (hence my website, http://qwtf.digitaljedi.com) and though I wasn't in a clan any longer, I still lingered in IRC and, after much soliciting, I finally found a guy who was willing to play against me. We played a bunch of games over several months, but that was about it for a while. Then I turned a buddy of mine living several hundred miles away into playing online, though without anything better than dial-up in my apartment at the time, I'd actually drive in to work on Saturdays to play on the broadband. After my then-girlfriend, now wife and I upgraded to DSL in 2005, some Google searching caused me to stumble upon nhlgamer.com, which was the Fins' website for logging games. Thankfully, they had an IRC channel, so I quickly got in touch with them. They were pretty amused at the (North) American who wanted to play against them, but they were never anything but nice to me and within a short time I was playing against them. The ping disadvantage was significant (this was well before the p2p kaillera client) but I never complained because I was just grateful for the competition and that they were willing to play against me. Some of my favorite memories from playing the Fins include: -beating Wayler the first time I ever played him (I did not beat him often after that) -My first tournament with the Fins, recreating the 2005 World Championships. The countries were assigned to players mostly randomly but they reserved USA for me. -The 2008 US Presidential election when they wanted to be the US. I played several tournaments with them, making the playoffs a few times, but never really got close to winning a title with them. No problem, I was having too good of a time. Also in 2005, I stumbled upon nhl94.com early in its existence (hence my super-low #23 registration number. ) Evan and I started chatting on AIM regularly and when he started up the first NHL '94 Classic league (Fall 2005), I was sure to sign up. I did quite well in the regular season, but habs beat me in seven games in the conference finals. That was the closest I would come to a championship for a long time. It was exciting to watch the community grow, and I eventually ran my own competition, the ill-fated NHL '94 Cup Chase. I also picked up SNES play and started making YouTube videos after smozoma posted his excellent video-making guide. NHL94.com highlights include: - (neck-and-neck with the birth of my son for greatest moment of my life)-earning my only two league championships by winning the Capitalism league both times it was played (134340!) -http://www.freewebs.com/nhl94winterleague/records.htm (18 goals in a game against a human being my personal best) -The knobbe.org crowd (Tecmo Super Bowl) once ran their own NHL '94 league, inspired by leagues over here. I and several NHL94.com'ers signed up and I won 33 matches in a row before swapping teams with someone else for competitive purposes. It's one of the longest NHL '94 winning streaks in this site's history, but it's not really legit because a lot of the games were against newbies. -kgman's *crazy* antics. Fun fact: I'm the one who turned him on to AOL Instant Messenger. He beat me in the finals of the Spring 2006 league and cost us all a bit of our sanity. You're welcome, everyone. -The batshit insane fact that we are able to play old console games from the 1990s against people hundreds and thousands of miles away. I'm sure I'm forgetting some things. I'll think of them, no doubt. (Edit #1: I didn't know the forum would actually embed the YouTube video. C00l.)

OMG THIS IS GOING TO BE GREAT WHILE I HUFF PAINT!!! In other news, I'm getting about 7-10x the usual number of YouTube hits the last couple of days as a result of the 94 publicity, so there's quite a bit of interest in this announcement.

The NHL is Down to Three Active Players Who Appeared in NHL '94: http://kotaku.com/the-nhl-is-down-to-three-active-players-who-appeared-in-510087238

For what it's worth, my NHL '94 Crazy Comeback video on YouTube got about 3x the usual number of hits on Friday.

Ahem. As the world champion of Playchoice-10 NES Tennis for nearly ten years as seen here: http://replay.marpirc.net/r/pc_tenis I strongly disagree with your argument that video tennis is terrible. Also, Mario Tennis is amazing and has a fantastic soundtrack, especially the Game Point and Set Point music: Game Point: Set Point:

TSB is a fine choice for #1. For what it's worth, they've got a larger online community, there are more tournaments, and I don't see professional documentaries being made about NHL '94. And it probably doesn't hurt that there's a "Tecmo Bo." Sure, '94 has Roenick, but the delicious wordplay is not there. As someone who played both games in online leagues (although I quit Tecmo back in like 2002 or something, so it's been a while I'll say that as far as actual gameplay goes, I think '94's gameplay is better for two reasons: 1) Player switching on defense. 2) Turnovers in Tecmo are BACKBREAKING. Since it's a short game, having a guy fumble in Tecmo can be absolutely brutal and there's little you can do about it short of trying to run out of bounds every single time. There's not really an equivalent in '94. The closest thing would be like giving up a cheap goal because your own guy skated it into his own net accidentally or something like that, but even then it's only one goal and can be recovered from. Still, '94 didn't develop quite as strong of a culture as TSB did, and '94 developed a strong culture! Obviously, a list like this is going to take that sort of factor into consideration, which is why '94 finished as high as second in the first place. Both games came along at the right time. The technology was starting to mature but expectations on sports games weren't that high. TSB was the first game that let you play a full season with real teams and players and it had lots of memorable touches and quirks-things like some absolute monster players, the ability to run around with the ball while 8 defenders chase helplessly, full statistical tracking, 90-yard throws, and even the cut scenes. It had great music and graphics, for its time, were a nice advance on what had come before. '94 was more of a high point in a series since '93 brought a lot to the table as well, but the addition of one-timers and goalie control made it into a masterpiece. The pace is just the right speed, the player control is slick, there are several viable ways to score (and viable ways to prevent scores), real teams, players, and playoffs (though full season play would have to wait for '95.) The sound of the skates and the organ music, the glass breaking, and other touches like that helped make the game much more than it might have been otherwise. So don't get upset about TSB being ahead of '94. Just be glad that the author recognized that these two games just touched a nerve in ways that other, more modern games haven't and honestly can't just because our expectations are much higher these days. TSB and '94 were revolutionary while today we're pretty much just getting evolutionary.

They're revealing five games a day this week. NHL '94 is not in slots 25-21. http://espn.go.com/espn/playbook/feature/video/_/id/9231036/playbook-top-25-sports-video-games-ever

Oh, stuff's happening, I guess. I don't know. I just recently started posting again with some frequency myself.

NHL94.com has had a thriving forum going since the early days of 2005. This thread will be a collection a classic forum posts that are probably worth a read if you haven't been around since those days. -NHL '94 Online Leagues (started 7 April 2005) Probably the first discussion of online leagues on the forum. This thread led to the creation of nhl94online.com and the leagues it has hosted. -kgman's State of NHL '94 Posts (first one 16 December 2005) kgman used to post regularly about the state of NHL '94 online. You must read his "words" for yourself. kgman -- The State of NHL94 Kgmans on the state of NHL 94 Kgman's weekly editorial on the state of NHL 94 The state of Nhl94 by the GOAT Kgman (featuring an eloquent translation by CamKneely) The state of NHL 94 Nhl 94 State Of The Union Address -Stanley Cup Bug (started 13 January 2006) The bug that lets you win the Stanley Cup every game! I didn't know about this one before. -Ten commandments of nhl '94 (started 1 March 2006) clockwise instructs us all...and many of us joined in with our own gems of wisdom. -The vote for a New Evan (supreme leader) (started 4 July 2007) kgman is at it again, this time insisting that we need to elect a new leader of NHL 94 because Evan wasn't doing a good enough job. The rest of us pointed out that Evan was doing a fantastic job. -KG Man to arrive in Chicago (started 8 June 2007) kgman's epic tale of traveling to Chicago. -Interview On NHL94.com (started 16 May 2006) Evan is interviewed by the Face Off Hockey Show about NHL '94 and the website. -Who Is The Best Genesis Player Currently? (started 6 February 2008) halifax asks the question. A good discussion of the good players at the time, and especially noteworthy as Evan includes a summary of winners and runners-up of the leagues played up to that point. -SNES vs. GENS Summit Series (started 22 November 2007) halifax decides to simulate a Summit Series using the SNES Juiced ROM (all players rated 100 in everything) and throws in the names of many, many NHL94.com coaches, producing humorous and enjoyable summaries. Game 1 Game 2 (As I note in the thread, he floored me with one line in particular.) Game 3 Game 4 Game 5 Game 6 Game 7 Game 8 Stats -Favorite Forum Moment (started 13 March 2008) halifax asks the question, and many of us respond with our favorite forum moments. -Just When You Thought You Were The Best At Nhl94.... (started 26 January 2008) Some guy starts a blog to show that he is the best in the world at NHL '94 by defeating the CPU repeatedly. The forum denizens try to get him to play with us online, but to no avail. The blog is no longer available. -ESPN Page 2 article (started 13 May 2008) halifax spots a mention of NHL '94 in an ESPN.com Page 2 article, complete with link to a NHL94.com screenshot. -All Time W-L-D Records... (started 28 April 2008) I ask for people's all-time online records and I get a healthy response from others. -How to win faceoffs (started 18 May 2008) A lengthy discussion...about how to win faceoffs. More to come later. Feel free to add your own to this thread.

Was I thinking of Bad News Baseball instead of Baseball Stars? Maybe they've both had leagues. So it appears we can add NHL '92, NHLPA '93, Bill Walsh, Madden '91 (which I suppose was just called John Madden Football), and Madden '92. I guess I'd forgotten about snesot.com. I found it once a while back, but yeah, they're definitely running this sort of thing over there. Let's see.... SMB3 (already on the list) Super Tennis Super Mario Kart NHL '94 Tetris Tetris Attack Yoshi's Cookie Super Bomberman Super Street Fighter II Kirby's Dream Course NBA Jam TE And a few more.

Someone's paying attention to what NHL.com is doing, cuz my top NHL '94 YouTube video, which usually gets 20-40 hits/day, got almost 200 hits on the 19th and 500+ on the 20th. No numbers for the 21st yet. The traffic sources say it's mostly YouTube searches driving the views, the top term by far being "nhl 94" (versus "nhl '94" and "nhl94.")